Basking in the after-glow of an amazing Pride Weekend, I am compelled to share one more post about this truly awesome event. The sense of community and, yes, PRIDE, I felt and feel after having participated in the parade and festival has left me soaring. At the same time, I am humbled by and grateful for the experience.
Utah Pride reinforced in a very real and powerful way what I knew already—that life, especially my life—is good; that being true to myself and to the God who created me brings completion and fulfillment, joy and happiness, satisfaction and peace. After years of merely surviving in a colorless world bound with the chains of fear and self-loathing, I am now thriving in a limitless universe of color and space.
When I think of the path I’ve traveled the last two years, I’m astonished. When I consider the love I feel for those who led me and sometimes carried me along that path, I am overwhelmed.
My life as a gay man is life worth living—every single second of it. It is precious, treasured, a pearl of great price.
In the brilliant light of truth, I now see that my closet never really was a closet. It was a prison, a cell, small dark and fetid, into which I will never return.
I can now sing with every fiber of my soul the words of gratitude that can only be understood with the emancipation of the spirit, "I'm free at last, I'm free at last. Thank God Almighty I'm free at last."
